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All replies
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Helpful answers
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Jan 16, 2016 4:25 AM in response to philippkellrby jkbull,This is troubleshooting 101 – three of your programs fiddle with what is typed on the keyboard, which is exactly the problem you are having:
- aText, which says it "accelerates your typing by replacing abbreviations";
- karabiner, which is described as "A powerful and stable keyboard customizer for OS X"; and
- seil, which is described as a "utility for the caps lock key and some international keys in PC keyboards".
One of these, or the combination of two or three of them, is likely to be the cause of your problem. That's because all of them "hook into the innards" of OS X to watch as you type on the keyboard and sometimes change what you type, which, as I wrote above, is exactly the problem you are having.
I advise you to first make sure that you have the latest versions of all of these programs and that those versions are supposed to work on El Capitan. After doing that, if the problem persists, try uninstalling them (one by one, in combinations) until the problem disappears. By "uninstall", I mean that you must uninstall each one using a utility or directions provided by the program's authors. Not fully uninstalling them may be worse than doing nothing.
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Jan 27, 2016 8:19 AM in response to maepyongby kluver,Same problem here. Running OSX 10.11.3. First character is lost
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Jan 28, 2016 11:50 PM in response to maepyongby Wimmmmm,I believe I have found a solution!
I had the same problem: starting Spotlight, and occasionally the first character went missing, thus rendering wrong search results and often opening a semi-random application.
As some else already pointed out: look at keyboard modifying situations...
Go to System Preferences > Keyboard > Shortcuts & select "Input Sources"
In my case, these two options "Select the previous input source" and the next were activated, with a warning icon at the side, mentioning "This hot key conflicts with other hot keys".
Deactivating these two options solved my "disappearing first character" problem!
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Jan 29, 2016 12:12 AM in response to Wimmmmmby dendroaspis,Thanks for sharing this. Unfortunately in my case there is no conflict in the keyboard shortcuts and the problem is still there. It seems to have become somehow less frequent recently, possibly after the latest OS update, but it's hard to quantify this precisely because I've also been using spotlight less as it had become frustrating.
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Feb 5, 2016 9:27 AM in response to dendroaspisby TaylorBo,Hey guys,
I had the same problem and it was driving me absolutely nuts. I use the Command + Space keyboard shortcut to launch and switch between apps on OS X.
Here’s what fixed it for me…
1. Open Spotlight in System Preferences
2. UNCHECK Allow Spotlight Suggestions in Spotlight and Look up.
The first letter has not dropped since changing this a few hours ago.
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Feb 5, 2016 9:35 AM in response to TaylorBoby sdebacker,It's unchecked but the problem is still present.
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Feb 5, 2016 9:40 AM in response to sdebackerby TaylorBo,Hmmm… I’m running 10.11.4 Beta (15E33e) and after I unchecked that setting it fixed things for me.
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Feb 5, 2016 9:45 AM in response to TaylorBoby TaylorBo,Maybe try relaunching Finder after you uncheck that setting? I also removed the duplicate keyboard shortcut mentioned previously (5 posts ago).
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Feb 5, 2016 11:18 AM in response to TaylorBoby johncook22,Unfortunately did not work for me. I tried resetting my computer too.
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Feb 9, 2016 8:27 AM in response to johncook22by Tobie Malins,The issue has reappeared, occasionally, on my Mac as of last night. An erase and reinstall of the OS had meant it had been fine for over a month up until that point.
The set of apps and services I use is pretty consistent, so I really can't think of anything new that I would have suddenly done to trigger its return.
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Feb 9, 2016 1:21 PM in response to jkbullby philippkellr,thanks for the the investigation, indeed those 3 apps mess with the keyboard, I now uninstalled all of them and that's not it. I guess it's something else which triggers this, should be a price for the person who finds out.
I also changed the spotlight shortcut to command-shift-space, this also didn't help. One thing I noticed though is that the issue happens most after the computer is woken up from sleep, when using it constantly for 10-20 minutes the issue appears less and less
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Feb 29, 2016 11:49 PM in response to dendroaspisby maepyong,Yes in my case also has no conflict in key shortcut.
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Mar 1, 2016 12:14 AM in response to maepyongby philippkellr,I have solved the issue now by installing Alfred. One of my colleagues had this issue years ago and he said that Alfred solved it for him. Since the installation (2 weeks ago) I didn't have this issue which proves that the problem lies in Spotlight itself and not in the keyboard settings.

